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Comment by mustacheemperor | Hacker News Reader

I'm an Alexa owner, and wish to god the two companies could get along at all. It feels like I'm punished regardless of the ecosystem I choose - if I use the Google Home, I miss out on the Alexa product line upgrades and there's no option comparable to the Dot for sprinkling around my home.

On the other hand, on Alexa I can't say "play fleetwood mac in the living room" (via chromecast). That single feature is nearly enough to send me to Google Home, except for the reasons I mentioned above...but I feel hesitant to stick with Alexa when I know the only reasons it can't do what I want are stupid.

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I own both a GH and an a 1st Gen Echo and I find Google Home's language processing much better than Alexa's. I can give the GH a complex command and most of the time it will understand and execute the request. So even in a somewhat noisy room if the TV is on or people are taking, I can usually get it to understand on the first attempt. Therefore its great for home automation. However, with Alexa, I have to be quite a bit more precise with my verbal commands or I have to rephrase and repeat the command. So not the best for home automation at this point.

But Alexa does seems to have a head-start with third-party integration and services. So for now I own one of each. I'm hoping that maybe both of them will reach parity at some point and I can finally settle on one of them.

Yup. I'm really fed up with the lack of interoperability. I have an Echo Dot, and hate that I can't use it to play back from Google Music (not without a beta-quality third-party Alexa skill that still requires me to use a stupid trigger word), and I can't push to Chromecast.

But the Google Home ecosystem isn't so great yet, so I don't want to jump into that basket.

I've been messing with some of the open source alternatives (+Raspberry Pi), and they're all pretty rough. I plan to spend some time to put together something easier to use, but it's a tall order.

You can now, multi room audio sync was added recently. I have two Echo's and I can say "play classical music [everywhere|office|living room]"

But if I want to play a show on my Fire TV Stick, do I still need to use the Alexa microphone in the remote, or can I talk to my Echo?

I believe you can now use your echo to control the fire tv

That is correct. FireTVs ship with an echo dot bundle now for that reason.

I don't really care about multi-room audio, I want to be able to play music through my hi-fi system by requesting it verbally, which works with the Google Home and a Chromecast Audio. There is literally no stereo image in these assistant-speakers, I wouldn't really use one for more than casual music listening (which the alexa is fine for, except for the limited library).

I've always wished the "voice web" would have taken off -- maybe it is about time for it again.

Alexa, Siri, Google Home, Cortana.. they could all use the same standards to become interoperable.

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